The moral economic school, which has flourished among anthropologists, economic historians, and classicists, has received only limited attention from political scientists. This is perplexing, since at its core is to be found an intersection of debates over rational choice theory, the character of modern and premarket societies, and the normative standing of the market—in other words, over issues of formidable importance to our discipline. I seek to correct that neglect by mapping out and critically analyzing the moral economists' conception of modernity, their critique of the economic approach to human behavior and institutions, and their attempt to formulate an Aristotelian theory of the economy. These projects, though flawed, together are more than rich enough to provide fertile ground for political scientists and philosophers. I conclude with a discussion of the moral economists' effort to develop a normative theory of the economy together with a related critique of the market.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), specifically the National Weather Service’s (NWS) National Hurricane Center (NHC), utilizes the hydrodynamic Sea, Lake, and Overland Surges from Hurricanes (SLOSH) model to simulate storm surge in 27 basins along the U.S East and Gulf Coasts. This information is provided to federal, state, and local partners to assist in a range of planning processes, risk assessment studies, and decision making. Based on climatology, tens of thousands of hypothetical hurricanes are simulated in each basin, and the potential storm surges are calculated. Storm surge composites—maximum envelopes of water (MEOWs) and maximum of maximums (MOMs)—are created to assess and visualize storm surge risk under varying conditions. While MEOWs and MOMs provide a local assessment of storm surge risk, they do not provide a national perspective owing to the 27 discrete grids. National assessments must therefore merge the grids together, which is a laborious task requiring considerable SLOSH and hydrodynamic modeling expertise. This paper describes the technique used to create national inundation maps for category 1–5 hurricanes using the SLOSH MOM product, and it provides a simple quantitative assessment of the potential societal impacts. Approximately 22 million people along the U.S East and Gulf Coasts are vulnerable to storm surge. For all hurricane categories, a substantial portion of the coastal population and housing units are at risk, and many evacuation routes become inundated. Florida is the most vulnerable state with 40% of its population at risk. These maps and analyses provide a new way to view, analyze, and communicate national storm surge risk and inundation.
I take up the question of political identity as the continuity of a community across time. In particular, I examine what it means to think of a political community as the subject of attribution across generations, that is, what is meant when it is made the bearer of responsibility for the past and a custodian of the future. In doing that, I focus on identity, memory, and responsibility and discuss that cluster of concepts using as an illustrative example the idea of constitutional patriotism and its relationship to the past.
J n their research note Robert Bates and Amy Curry (1992) have drawn our attention to the importance for political science of the challenges posed by the moral economic approach. Using their essay as a springboard and recasting their understanding of the idea of the moral economy, I show that the full significance of this controversy would be better illuminated by moving the debate on to a different terrain, one that captures the fundamental sources of the antagonism between the moral economic and competing approaches. I begin by setting out the central difficulty in Bates and Curry's reading of the moral economy argument and relate that to how the controversy has been framed in the recent political science literature. I then offer a sketch of the core claims of the moral economic approach, drawing out the radicalness of their challenge, and offer an estimate of their weaknesses and value. I conclude with some observations about political philosophy and the idea of the moral economy.
Questions of exclusion, membership and the status of resident foreigners press upon liberal political thought and society with a particular sharpness, given the universalist underpinnings of the liberal commitment. How within the horizon of liberalism and rights discourse are we to think of the foreigner? The article suggests some reasons why we should consider suspect the cluster of notions surrounding alienage and sketches why the moral salience of the foreignness of these outsiders at our door and present among us has diminished, and thus brought under scrutiny our traditional comportment toward them. But it is not so much intended here to seek a resolution of these issues as to motivate a cluster of questions, to argue for their importance and to show the inadequacy of the treatment of them that we have inherited.
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